Such a frustrating disappointment

Excellent but underrated film

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Back in the early 1980's, the VHS market allowed my family to enjoy movies that never made it to Ellwood City, about an hour from Pittsburgh. Our hometown video store, Prime Time Video, was packed with films that fascinated me. I wish that someone had footage of all of the movies on shelf. I know we definitely rented Ruggero Deodato's Raiders of Atlantis and this bizarre piece of cinema about an Aztec god loose in Manhattan. What a time to be alive, when you could walk down the street and wander row after row of horror movie choices!Q The Winged Serpent has Boris Vallejo artwork on its poster and VHS box, which made it leap into my hands. As a kid, I hated the parts with humans. As a grown-up, I'm so intrigued by them.The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a feather winged dragon, has found its new pyramid on the Chrysler Building. The film starts by showing us how it finds and devours the heads of its victims in gory detail. Meanwhile, an Aztec cult is leaving sacrificed victims in its wake as Detective Shepard (David Carradine, Death Race 2000) and Sgt. Powell (Richard Roundtree, Shaft) try to keep up.The film cuts to a failed diamond heist that leads Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty, who owns this film with a manic Method performance) to the title monster's nest. He uses his new knowledge to move away from crime (and jazz piano playing) as he extorts the city for the location of the creature's egg.Shephard finds out the location on his own, ruining Quinn's plans. The cops conduct an attack that takes out a baby Q as the creature returns home, wiping out nearly everyone (don't take Shaft, Q!) until it's shot over and over, falling dead to the streets below. The cop also saves Quinn as a crazed Aztec priest almost sacrifices the crook to his gods.That said - the magic of the past in man's modern world is not gone. The film ends with one last egg hatching.Q is a great movie even without the monster. In Will Harris' great oral history of the film, David Caradine said: "I thought if he had left the monster out of it, between me and Michael Moriarty, there was a real great story there between the detectives and the sleazebag heroin addict/petty-thief character. That's where the power in the movie is. That's where the heart of it is... and not in the chicken that ate New York!"And this is a movie that rose from tragedy! Cohen had just been fired from I, the Jury and didn't want to waste the hotel room he had already paid for. He wrote the script, hired actors and was done with pre-production in just six days!Like all of Cohen's films this is a movie that outdoes its small budget and looks like a million bucks. It has heart - and plenty of other organs - and verve and panache and any other hyperbole you'd love to bestow upon it.

Let me dash your expectations right from the start: Q the Winged Serpent is not the story of 007's lovable gadget-master muting himself into a flying monster and attacking Noo Yawk. I know. I was crestfallen too. But, what we do get is nearly as perplexing. Befitting all expectations, Q is exactly the kind of trashy pulp escapism stalwarts of the Ray Harryhausen house of stop motion behemoths will lap up. Against all expectations it's actually fairly good. And not just 'bad good', even. Within the gloriously daft monster mash framework, schlock sultan Larry Cohen is subversive enough to deliver a surprisingly watchable, clever, and thoroughly contemporary police procedural. Q is silly yet sly enough to continually pull the rug out from viewers, with a self-aware wink that's so weirdly fascinating you almost forget to set internal timers for the next batch of heads or feet to fall from the sky. There's a constantly shifting sense of who's in on what joke throughout Q, and it helps keep the film a vibrantly enjoyable watch. Initially, Cohen seems more interested in crafting his murder mystery, and there's a sly sarcasm to his treatment of the monster movie ensconcing it. Rather than the slow tension building of his 50s source texts, Cohen takes a leaf out of Jaws' handbook, starting with a splashy monster massacre, then conjuring each subsequent screeching bloodbath with the same fastidious clockwork of the rotating rooftop sunbathers that become his creature's prey. Cohen's Quetzalcoatl attacks are so precisely timed, brazenly foregrounded, and cheerily gruesome, you almost expect him to accompany them with silent film style intertitles trumpeting "You want carnage? Well here you go!!" Meanwhile, Cohen's nearly laughably disconnected 'real movie' cop drama zings along, with impressively naturalistic dialogue sold well by an improv-heavy cast who help keep the film snappy. But, when given the elbow room to expand his cop drama, Cohen's plot is so purposefully vacuous it's at odds with its relatively sophisticated telling. Think Jaws birthed by unlikely parents The Taking of Pelham 123 and Them!, and you've got a fairly good sense of Cohen's duelling art-house and outhouse sensibilities, and ensuing plucky, sardonic humour. Take the Aztec ritual sacrifice subplot fuelling the creature attacks: intriguing, but given so little attention it's transparently an afterthought. Take the cheeky graphic matches throughout, consistently teasing the Quetzalcoatl's arrival, only to subvert expectations, only to pull the same gag, again, within a matter of minutes, and have it work, again, goddamit. Take the classically spooky score and bobbing panoramic aerial shots of the city, landing somewhere between silly 50's foreboding and goofy Tommy acid trip. Even the Quetzalcoatl's stop motion attains this blend of impressive and cheekily low-fi (its movements look deceptively convincing from afar, yet its close-ups are delightfully cheesy), which only adds to the campy fun. It's hard to tell who Cohen's having on throughout: audiences expecting pure, unfiltered trash, or daring to dream of sophisticated, nuanced storytelling therein? A studio expecting a taut, low-budget cult moneymaker? Himself, for hesitating to fully commit to one or the other? It's hard to say, but the result is surprisingly jubilant and addictively watchable throughout. If anyone's in on the joke, it's Cohen's cast, who are just too damn good to even acknowledge their B-movie slumming here. Michael Moriarty delivers a performance so full of playfully controlled lunacy he reaches Christopher Walken levels of unhinged but strangely effective. His righteously indignant, nebbish loser hood should be thoroughly dislikable throughout, but Moriarty is taut yet unstrung enough throughout that he's oddly compelling - never more than when bellowing instructions on how to devour his heist buddies to the Quetzalcoatl with a flat affect that has to be heard to be believed. B-king and Bill himself David Carradine glides through the film with a breezy charisma, likable enough that it's easy to imagine an entire monster/detective franchise being hung on his shoulders. With this in mind, it's sad to see Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, so painfully underutilized. He's fantastic his few moments to shine - namely, tossing one-liner metaphors left right and centre while roughing up Moriarty's lout - but inexcusably benched at the back of the shot to an almost aggravating extent. Candy Clark delivers consistently solid work as Moriarty's hard-edged but unfeasibly patient girlfriend, while Malachy McCourt is deviously charismatic in the 'Jaws mayor' role, micromanaging mass panic.You want a sense of how delightfully confused Q the Winged Serpent's reception was? As Roger Ebert recounts, it was premiered not at a midnight B-horror circuit, but Cannes(!). There, critics could pontificate on hidden meanings and tonal subversiveness, amidst, as critic Rex Reed effused, "all that drek." Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff's response? "The drek was my idea." If Quetzalcoatl is the deity of wind and learning, appropriated here as Z-grade killing machine, Larry Cohen is its high priest troll. And the trashily sophisticated mischief they make is rather delightful indeed.-7.5/10

A monster movie that is like those of the 1950's, but so different as to make it interesting too. This monster movie has more cops trying to find things out and uncover the truth of the Aztec cult than it has monster flying through city moments. Still, it has the unexpected in it and an interesting enough story to off set the fact the title character really is not in this film much. The final scene though is more of the type found in your typical monster movie as the creature must be brought down. Michael Moriearty is in this film as he was in a few other horror movies during the 1980's. The rest of the cast is good as well. The monster is okay, but really not all that memorable, which may explain why they felt the need to make it appear as little as possible. Some good bloody scenes in this one, but nothing to gory, most of the kills had more to do with sacrifice than the monster itself. Still, for a different type of monster movie that has more mystery but an actual monster too this is the movie for you. What I mean by that, usually when a movie features this much detecting and stuff the monster ends up being staged, fake, or a hoax.

This flick is a distinctive and haunting oddity , concerning about a winged serpent , a dragonlike , which carries out creepy killings , happening in N.Y. City . A pair of detectives (David Carradine , Richard Roundtree) are investigating the strange events . As the giant winged bird hungry for sunbathers and rooftop construction workers . Thanks help a delinquent (Michael Moriarty) who encounters the monster's hidden nest on the Chrisler building , detective Sheperd discovers that several murders committed in violent manner have been executed as bloody sacrifices to Aztec God named Quetzalcóatl , a feathered serpent whose two halves are a serpent and a bird .This is a rough-edged chiller and results to be an entertaining return to monster movies from the 50s . Simple and stop-motion monster special effects by recently deceased David Allen , usual to 'Full moon' and 'Empire' Factory . Good cast as an overacting Michael Moriarty and David Carradine , Richard Roundtree as Police Inspectors ; and nice support casting as Eddie Jones and Candy Clark as crooks'fiancée . The film is well produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff who along with James H. Nicholson financed numerous movies of various genres , including monster movies , during the 50s, 60s , and 70s for their production company called ¨American International Pictures¨ . Atmospheric photography by Fred Murphy who has a successful career as an expert cameraman . The picture was compelling and originally written/realized by Larry Cohen . He's a B series craftsman , such as : terror genre (Stuff , Return to Salem's Lot , It's alive I ,I and Island of the alive) , hard hitting crime films (FX , Ambulance) and Blaxploitation(Black Caesar , Hell up in Harlem , Original gangsters) ; plus , a prestigious screenwriter (Phone booth , The ex , Invasion of privacy) and usually writes all his own scripts . This is a cult movie to be liked for chillers and monster films admirers .